Frank Boosman is a principal with Z Shift, a consultancy focused on systems and software design and development, notably in the areas of software ecosystems and systems-of-systems. Prior to joining Z Shift, he served as a director at Lockheed Martin, where he was a key advocate for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare via simulation-based system-of-systems engineering and analytics. His paper on this topic won the Best Paper award at the leading simulation and training conference, I/ITSEC, in 2010. He joined Lockheed Martin when they acquired 3Dsolve, a simulation training firm for which he served as COO. He served in a variety of VP-level roles for Be Incorporated, a vendor of software platforms for Internet appliances. He was a co-founder of Red Storm Entertainment, where he served as VP of Product Development and where he co-created Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six, the first realistic first- person tactical combat game. He has also served as VP and General Manager of Virtus Studios, which he designed Tom Clancy SSN, the first 3D submarine simulation game, and as Senior Product Marketing Manager at Adobe Systems, where he was a founding team member and the original product manager of Adobe Acrobat.

Keynote description

The rise of software ecosystems, such as the Apple iOS App Store and the Google Android Market, is well-documented. These ecosystems are software platforms in which developers are motivated to deliver applications, both commercial and freeware, that extend the functionality of the platform and increase its value for end users, fellow developers, and platform owners. What is not understood at this point is how to use such software ecosystems to deliver high reliability, high assurance, trusted applications for mission-critical tasks. This lack of understanding is especially acute when applications from various sources must coordinate to accomplish a common goal. A greater understanding of how to provide reliability and assurance to software ecosystems would enable their use in domains in which reliability is critical, such as healthcare. This could in turn could lead to dramatically faster innovation in such domains by leveraging a much broader base of software development expertise.

Tom Mens

Keynote: Analysing the evolution of social aspects of open source software projects

Abstract: Empirical software engineering research aims to empirically study and understand various types of software-related activities, with the aim to improve the software development process. Many of these studies are dedicated to evolving software projects, and open source software projects in particular. These studies often base themselves on relevant data extracted from software repositories or other types of data sources commonly used by the communities surrounding the software project (e.g. software developers and users). The software environment under study (i.e. the software-related artefacts) together with the communities and persons producing and using these artefacts is sometimes coined as a software ecosystem. Our hypothesis is that the social aspects of a software ecosystem significantly influence the software product quality, the way the product evolves over time, as well as the popularity and success rate of a software product. In particular, the way in which developers and users work, interact and communicate may provide crucial understanding in the software ecosystem. Such understanding will allow us to improve upon the current state-of-the-practice, by learning from mistakes or success stories from the past. In this talk, we present a tool allowing the extraction, visualisation and analysis of information concerning communities gravitating around open source software projects. We show a number of empirical studies we are carrying out, and present a number of interesting avenues of future work.